Geneticists are striving to characterize the genetic source of complex diseases including cancer, autoimmune and neurological disorders. However, the underlying mechanisms driving these diseases remain elusive. It is believed that both germline and somatic mutations in combination with spontaneous variants that accumulate in cells over a lifetime, are major factors that drive disease onset and reoccurrence.
Whole genome amplification (WGA) followed by next generation sequencing (NGS) is often utilized to identify nucleic acid mutations. However, existing WGA methods often introduce artifacts and errors, especially when starting with limited amounts of template. Such errors make it difficult to detect rare mutations among the noise introduced by the amplification and sequencing techniques employed.
As a consequence, a need exists to amplify DNA and RNA from limited samples (such a single cells) with high fidelity and low amounts of Template Independent DNA Amplification (TIDA).